Some photos, oh and some more photos

Remember - to switch your lights off on the 28th March at 20h30 for an hour!!!



I had all good intentions of rushing home and doing a blog post. Only after a week away and nine hours on the road because of road works, I instead came back to various piles of pooh. And since I didn’t want to do a blog post which was full of whinging, I thought I’d just lay off posting completely.

In a nutshell, the holiday was lovely – see pictures below, and the pooh involves:

• painters who didn’t return to finish a job which they had botched in several places and despite multiple assurances they would return to fix things. We now have to find someone else to do so which will mean shelling out more money;

• debt collecting attorneys who are sending me threatening letters for monies owing on an account which I don’t even have. This has meant spending half a day in the store where I supposedly hold the account filling in dispute forms and getting legal advice - and it's still not over;

• and then there was the whole Dalai Lama thing which I’m sure you all know about by now – when, scoring a stunning own goal, the South African government, under pressure from the Chinese, refused the Dalai Lama a visa to the country in order to attend a peace conference hosted by, amongst others, Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and former presidents FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. But that’s a topic for another blog post. By which stage it will be old news.

So, back to being on holiday – which now seems an awfully long time ago... I think I’ll just let the pictures do the talking for themselves! And erm, there may be a lot of photos for the next while. It seems, armed with a digital camera I will take a gazillion shots in order to get “the one perfect shot” and I have an eye that sees “shots” everywhere!

So, there were beachscapes at Noetzie...

Sunsets at Plettenberg Bay...

There were tides of oyster catchers running on the beach...

There were country roads that disappeared into deep valleys...

There miles and miles of vistas of the Outeniqua Mountains...

There were piles of driftwood, some with small birds paying a visit...

There were oceanscapes in moody weather...

There were days spent lounging on the edge of the sea, right down there...

There were walks on beaches...

Crashing waves...

There were toadstools and funghi in the forests...

There was lunch amidst the vines at the Bramon Wine Estate...

And of course there were oysters in Knysna at the Knysna Oyster Company...

And then, oh well, there was just a lot more of this...

I know, I know, it's a tough life, but like I keep saying, someone's got to do it. And I promise, I did think of you on many occasions, and I toasted to your good health far too many times! So you see, you did get to go with me - in spirit...


POSTSCRIPT: For more pics go here or click on the Flickr link in the side bar - and prowl through the first five pages - I did say I was snap-happy, didn't I...?!

Happy Holidays

This blog is going on a short holiday. And hard as it will be for this blogger to tear herself away from the rewrite of her manuscript, she's going on holiday too (but she may take her laptop with so she can keep scribbling furiously).

While the blog will stay just as where it is and practice meditative techniques and other means of relaxation, the blogger will be going here...


Where the view from her room will look like this...


She will eat oysters and prawns and sip chilled white wine.

She may walk with these guys for a while...


She will enjoy vistas like this...




She'll take walks here...



and here...



And she'll find photo opps like this...



No doubt she'll return with even more photographs than before - and here's hoping you feel you're enjoying her holiday with her!

See you in a week or so!

Breath of All Things

And continuing The Moon Topple's Phoctober theme...

I want to say at the outset of this post that although I write, my natural leaning is towards prose - fiction and non-fiction. I do not incline easily to poetry - it requires far too much thinking to my mind! - though heaven knows as a teenager I spent hours scribbling "pomes". That said, there are times when some words appear that simply do not fit the shape of prose and so I take them and package them into forms that seem more suitable to what they are. I'm not sure one could or should call it poetry.

I am the wind.

I am the space between the leaves

the breath that carries the first robin’s song.

I am the swell and fall of the ocean

the rainbow on the splash of waves.

I am the silence between words

the stillness between the notes of a song.

I linger between buildings

drift in the valleys

and rest in the depths of a lake.

I rise up above the peaks

and soar through the stars.

I am the space between your fingers

the place within your dreams.

I flow through all things

encompassing and enveloping all.

Infinite and expansive

I am that I am

I am

and

I am is so much bigger than me.

These shots were taken earlier this year along a southern coastal stretch of South Africa known as The Garden Route. It is an area blessed by miles of pristine sandy beaches, rocky coves, placid lakes, deep ravines, tumbling rivers and miles of indigenous forest filled with giant Yellowwood trees. It is yet another one those incredibly beautiful places provided by nature amidst the other insanity that surrounds us.